Concerningly, the Productivity Commission has highlighted declining school attendance, falling student engagement, collapsing teacher morale, and serious safety concerns in early childhood services.
Victorian school attendance rates are going backwards, dropping 3.7 percentage points since 2019, from 91.5 per cent to just 87.8 per cent now has some of the worst attendance outcomes in the country. Attendance is a key indicator of student engagement and future outcomes, and its continued decline reflects a government that has failed to keep students connected to the classroom.
In 2023, 38 per cent of registered teachers working in Victorian schools indicated they intend to leave the profession before retirement. That figure has increased from 21.8 per cent in 2020, a surge of 16.2 percentage points in just three years. At the same time, the proportion of teachers who plan to remain in teaching until retirement has plummeted from 41.6 per cent in 2020 to 27.1 per cent - a 14.5 point collapse in workforce confidence
The report also raises serious concerns about safety in early childhood education and care, with Victorian preschools recording 1,139 serious incidents in 2024-25 - the highest raw count of any state in Australia, and a sharp increase from 710 incidents just two years earlier. raising further questions about child safety, oversight, and standards under the Labor government.
Incidents involving children being locked in or out of services, children being unaccounted for, and repeated emergency service callouts are simply unacceptable. Parents deserve to know their children are safe, and Labor must explain why these failures are occurring on their watch.
Shadow Minister for Education, Brad Rowswell, said "the latest data confirmed what many parents and teachers already know: Labor's so-called Education State is failing to deliver the outcomes Victorian students deserve.
"The best place for a student on a school day is learning at school. When students are not in the classroom, they are risking their learning, and it places an avoidable burden on parents and caregivers," he said.
"For more than a decade, Labor should have been ensuring that every student has every opportunity to learn and excel at school. Disappointingly, students are missing weeks of learning each year, putting them further behind students in other states.
"Our education problems run deeper than attendance alone. Labor has seriously neglected young Victorians," he said.
"A Liberals and Nationals government would stop wasteful spending, repair the budget, and invest in schools through our essential services guarantee," Mr Rowswell said.
